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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8981544" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Before doing any campaign writing, decide what kind of game you want. Some (not all!) of the questions you could ask are, in no particular order:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">What tone do I want, and what tone would my players like? Dark (lots of wickedness/no heroes) or bright (evil is an aberration/heroes abound), grim (heroes can't "fix" big problems) or noble (heroes can change the world)? </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">What overall genre should it be? High fantasy (epic adventures more like LotR), low fantasy (down-to-earth adventures like GoT), science-fantasy, horror, etc.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Are there any elements I really want, or that my players really want? E.g. "I've always wanted to include a faction of evil druids," or "I know one of my players loves the whole idea of wizard academia and research."</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">What kinds of adventures or challenges excite my players? Some players are big into acting/roleplaying, others love to explore, some are all about the combat, some just love the feeling of Big Number Goes Up, etc. Knowing what your players want will help you give them a game they'll love.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">How long do I want to run this game? Long (over a year), short (a few months), medium (somewhere in-between), one-shot, etc. It sounds like you already know the answer to this but it's good to commit to something specific.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">What are my players likely to play? If you know that one of your players loves dragonborn or dwarves or the like, you can prepare in advance to include these things and make them interesting.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">How much time will I have for each session? This will help you determine how to present the game and how much stuff you can expect to offer the players. (I'm really bad at this, and continually over-estimate how much we will get through in any given session.)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">How many magic items do I want to give the players? This is a surprisingly contentious question--it's good to know well in advance whether you want to give many, few, or moderate amounts of magic items. Different players value different things.</li> </ul>Once you've answered at least some of those questions, it becomes a LOT easier to write your campaign. But I would caution you, as a first-time DM, to not OVER-prepare. It's very easy to spend a lot of time on preparation you don't end up using...and it's also very easy to accidentally railroad your players if you become too attached to the prep work you've done. It's healthy to find a good balance between knowing and preparing just enough so that the world feels fleshed out and real, while leaving the rest open to being defined later, so that player choices actually matter and have real consequences.</blockquote>

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